News – Juvenile Justice Information Exchangehttps://jjie.org
Juvenile Justice News for People Who Care About Children and the LawThu, 24 May 2018 14:22:21 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.6Fewer DACA Students Enrolling in California Collegeshttps://jjie.org/2018/05/16/fewer-daca-students-enrolling-in-california-colleges/
https://jjie.org/2018/05/16/fewer-daca-students-enrolling-in-california-colleges/#respondWed, 16 May 2018 12:00:57 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=714107

LOS ANGELES — With President Donald Trump announcing his intent to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, college students in California fear this will affect their status in the United States.

In California though, undocumented students can still apply for financial aid at schools through the California Dream Act.

In the year since the president’s statement, the number of applications for financial aid through CADA and the number of students enrolled in the LA community college system have significantly dropped.

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/05/16/fewer-daca-students-enrolling-in-california-colleges/feed/0Bryan Stevenson’s Message to Youth Workers: Change Narrative for Kidshttps://jjie.org/2018/05/07/bryan-stevensons-message-to-youth-workers-change-narrative-for-kids/
https://jjie.org/2018/05/07/bryan-stevensons-message-to-youth-workers-change-narrative-for-kids/#respondMon, 07 May 2018 15:05:48 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=708433PALM SPRINGS, California — At the end of April, Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Institute opened a striking museum and a memorial to 4,400 victims of lynching in the United States.

Barely a week later, the death row lawyer and MacArthur grant recipient flew to California to kick off an after-school conference.

What do the two events have in common?

Being "proximate" to marginalized children "is how we begin to change the world," he told hundreds of people who work in after-school programs.

The Montgomery, Alabama, museum, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, built on the site of a former slave warehouse, links past slavery to injustices of today. The message of the nearby memorial is that the atrocity of lynching and the accompanying idea of white supremacy must be faced if American society is going to change.

Currently, one in three black male babies can expect to go to jail or prison during their lifetime, he said, and one in six Latino boys can expect to go to jail or prison.

“We’ve got to find a way to change these expectations,” Stevenson said at the BOOST Conference in Palm Springs Thursday.

Too many politicians put forward solutions that don’t work, he said; they’re at too great a distance. Youth workers, however, are up close, and up close you hear things you can’t see or hear from a distance, he said.

Youth workers are the key

Youth workers must change the prevailing narrative and also provide hope for children, Stevenson said.

A misguided narrative — the war on drugs that was launched several decades ago — resulted in mass incarceration, he said. It included the idea of “a new species of child” who was promulgating crime, he said.

“They said these aren’t children, they’re superpredators,” Stevenson said. This narrative was based on fear and anger, he said.

States began lowering the minimum age for trying children as adults. Stevenson has represented 9- and 10-year-olds facing 50- or 60-year sentences, he said.

Part of this narrative is that “you are presumed dangerous and guilty because of your color,” he said.

Stevenson is founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that has represented children prosecuted as adults and brought legal challenges against excessive sentences. It’s proven the innocence of death row inmates and has challenged abuse in prison. He is also author of the book “Just Mercy.”

Being close to poor and marginalized children opens youth workers to painful feelings, he said. But after-school workers must hang on to hope, he said, because you can’t give it to children in your life unless you have it yourself, he said.

“It would be tragic to take away the hope from your children,” he said.

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/05/07/bryan-stevensons-message-to-youth-workers-change-narrative-for-kids/feed/0Brooklyn Students Use ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ to Explore Solutions to Gun Violencehttps://jjie.org/2018/04/30/brooklyn-students-use-theatre-of-the-oppressed-to-explore-solutions-to-gun-violence/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/30/brooklyn-students-use-theatre-of-the-oppressed-to-explore-solutions-to-gun-violence/#respondMon, 30 Apr 2018 18:12:33 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=704624NEW YORK — It’s early evening on a warm Tuesday in March, and a handful of teenagers are commanding rapt attention in a corner of a Chelsea art gallery. They’ve just performed a short theater piece of their own devising, an exploration of gun violence and the twisting, ricocheting trajectory that one bullet can follow through a community.

But that’s just the start of the night. This play is not merely artistic expression. At a time when student activism about gun regulation is gaining national attention, these young actors are also experienced organizers against gun violence. Using improvisation, storytelling and play, they aim to draw the audience into the struggle too.

“I’m an activist and an actor,” said Enyah Jackson, 17. “I can put both into one.”

Jackson and the other actors are all alumni of a youth organizing program called YO S.O.S. — “Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets” — administered by the Crown Heights Mediation Center in Brooklyn. The teens spent a year getting trained in anti-violence and anti-oppression techniques.

Beginning in January 2017, they learned theater games under the guidance of Katy Rubin, the executive director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. It partners with community groups across the city, forming theater troupes to create original plays about the issues that affect them. As these YO S.O.S. participants neared the end of the program last spring, they began working with TONYC for what was supposed to be one performance.

Instead, they ended up performing together for nearly a year, with some cast changes as students left for college.

Forum gets audience involved

The hallmark of a Theatre of the Oppressed show is a forum afterwards, when the audience works with the actors to identify, and then try to solve, problems raised during the play.

LinkedIn

Katy Rubin

“There’s no performance that just ends in a performance,” Rubin said. “We’re not just showing a problem, we’re brainstorming ideas.”

At the center of this play’s plot is an act of gun violence: one character, played by Khadafy “Mike” Ramirez, 18, is shot to death outside his school by a rival, played by Jackson. The play, called “The School-to-Prison Pipeline,” explores how this moment ripples through the rest of the characters’ lives. Ultimately, one student is suspended from school for being too distressed by the shooting and her classmate’s death to concentrate in class.

Heather Day, who oversees YO S.O.S. as director of youth programs at the Mediation Center, said the play helps demonstrate that gun violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

“Every show we've done has been about gun violence but also about a lot of other things, because these issues are interconnected,” she said. “For young people, a lot of times the conversation starts with them talking about the oppression they feel at school from their teachers or from school safety officers,” like the one represented in this play dragging a student to suspension.

Every Theatre of the Oppressed performance has a facilitator, known as a Joker.

“The joker in a deck of cards doesn’t have a suit, so is an unbiased facilitator, isn’t coming in with an agenda or an answer or even what the problem is,” Rubin explained. “They're really coming in with a set of tools to help identify a problem within the community.”

Every student in the YO S.O.S. alumni troupe is trained as a Joker, so they take turns leading audiences through warm-up exercises before each show to get them invested as “spectators” — active viewers.

Audience gets to change the narrative

The Joker also directs the forum afterwards. At the show in March, Gariyana Williams, 19, took on this role. At the play’s conclusion, she asked audience members to name the problems the characters faced. One by one, they shared what they observed.

“Lack of compassion.”

“Militant security guards.”

“Trauma pushed to the side.”

After this exercise, a few individuals can replace a character in a scene with the goal of trying to solve one of the problems they witnessed.

This is harder than it sounds. A proposed solution can open the door to another set of challenges and policy failures. One audience member replaced a distressed student mourning her classmate’s death. That person’s solution was to request to see the school counselor — leading to a conversation about the shortage of trained social workers on school grounds.

But that doesn’t mean a solution is out of reach. Karencia Mitchell, 16, who plays the aggressive school security guard, has become involved with another youth-led activism network that specifically campaigns for more counselors in schools. She said she hopes audiences, by becoming a part of the play, will become more actively involved in their communities afterward, too.

The goal for any Theatre of the Oppressed show is for audience members to walk away feeling empowered to make change — to move, as Rubin put it, from “What would I do in the character’s shoes?” to “What can I do in my own shoes?”

The troupe members will also wrap up their experience with a sense of their own power, Jackson said. This fall, she will begin college with dreams of running for Congress on a criminal justice platform. The YO S.O.S. theater troupe will send her forward with new tools for taking action.

“There are other ways to fight the system other than to be rowdy,” she said. “Once you’re smart enough to fight with your mind and words, nothing can stop you.”

This story has been updated.

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/30/brooklyn-students-use-theatre-of-the-oppressed-to-explore-solutions-to-gun-violence/feed/0New Hub Resource: Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilitieshttps://jjie.org/2018/04/26/new-hub-resource-discipline-disparities-for-black-students-boys-and-students-with-disabilities/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/26/new-hub-resource-discipline-disparities-for-black-students-boys-and-students-with-disabilities/#respondThu, 26 Apr 2018 18:03:52 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=702447“Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities” from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyses the latest school discipline data (2013-14) from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), five case studies of school districts that are reforming their school discipline practices and seven case studies of investigations conducted by the departments of Education and Justice into discrimination and disparities in school discipline.

The CRDC collects demographic data of students receiving out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, referrals to law enforcement, expulsions, corporal punishment and school-related arrests. It does not capture data on less severe disciplinary actions, such as detentions. While the report is focused on disparities in school discipline practices, it notes that students who are suspended from school are more likely to experience future involvement in the juvenile justice system through what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

The GAO analysis of the CRDC data finds that black students, boys and students with disabilities were disproportionately disciplined in K-12 public schools regardless of the kind of disciplinary action, the level of school poverty or type of school attended. The report notes that while disparities alone are not evidence that discrimination has taken place, these data raise serious concerns that a combination of intentional discrimination, policies with unjustified disparate impact, implicit bias and/or a number of other factors may account for the disparities.

The report also outlines several reforms that states, districts and schools are adopting in order to 1) comply with changing state laws, 2) settle investigations conducted by the departments of Education or Justice or 3) of their own accord.

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/26/new-hub-resource-discipline-disparities-for-black-students-boys-and-students-with-disabilities/feed/0Journey to Passion: Young Man Locked up at Rikers Helps Organizer to Close ithttps://jjie.org/2018/04/25/journey-to-passion-formerly-incarcerated-youth-becomes-a-close-rikers-organizer/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/journey-to-passion-formerly-incarcerated-youth-becomes-a-close-rikers-organizer/#respondWed, 25 Apr 2018 19:57:13 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=701872NEW YORK — They stood on the steps of City Hall; faith leaders, community organizers, formerly incarcerated men and women. They stood behind Democratic state Sen. Brian Benjamin with banners in their hands. One read: “#closerikers.” Another: “Free New York.” Among them was 26-year-old Vidal Guzman, dressed in black except for, across his chest, “#closerikers build communities” in white and pink.

He listened as Benjamin spoke, and walked up to the microphone when his name was called.

A former inmate, Guzman first went to Rikers at 16.

Standing in front of the podium, Guzman spoke of the way Rikers has stolen the fathers, sons and brothers of the minority communities. He spoke with the passion of someone who experienced the violence and trauma of incarceration at a young age. His main goal was to convince everyone gathered around him, the importance of closing Rikers and keeping young men and women out of jail. Although he is now rallying against Rikers, Guzman’s time in there showed him that it is not a solution for any person in society, muchless a young teenage boy.

“There’s no way you should send any individual that’s 16 or 17 years old to jail or think that that is the way to solve a problem,” Guzman said.

Raised by a single mother in Harlem, Guzman began selling drugs when he was 9 years old to help his older brother put food on the table.

“I see my brother selling drugs,” Guzman said. “I started selling drugs just like him. That was the conditions that was happening around us. You see everyone else doing it, it becomes regular.”

By the time he was 15, Guzman was part of a gang. At 16, he was arrested for robbery and drug possession, tried as an adult and sent to Rikers Island.

“When you’re 16, you always expect something, probably police would like slap you on the hand and you’ll go home,” said Guzman. “That wasn’t what happened.”

His first day in Rikers was a nightmare because he couldn’t go home. By the end of his first week, he saw three teenagers commit suicide.

Griffin Hammond

Vidal Guzman

“When that happened, I knew that I was in a place that was torture,” he said. “It was torture island. It took people to take their lives to not be in this environment.”

Guzman was welcomed by his peers the second week when 20 teenagers ran inside his cell and beat him up, only stopping when a corrections officer stepped in.

For almost two years in Rikers, Guzman said he had to fight physically and mentally every day. At 18, he went home, but he was changed.

“I didn’t trust my mom, I didn’t trust my friends, because of all the trauma that happened when I was 16, 17,” he said.

His first week back, he would wake up with his fist balled up, thinking he might get into a fight. He’d forget he was back home.

At 19, Guzman was sentenced to Greene Correctional Facility for five years after being sent to Rikers again for drug- and gang- related activities. Despite being thrown into solitary confinement multiple times during his sentence, Guzman said his second time in prison was different because of another detainee serving 25 years to life. Guzman said the detainee told him that he had the opportunity to go home compared to others. After the conversation, Guzman said he landed in solitary confinement a month before he was supposed to go home.

This time, though, he realized that he had to change.

“I came home on a mission,” Guzman said. “I was on a mission to be someone that could prove everyone wrong, even my own family members.”

Guzman became a fellow of Drive Change, a nonprofit organization that gives formerly incarcerated youth on-the-job training, and employs them to work on a food truck. Roy Waterman, cofounder of Drive Change who had also been locked up for 12 years, said when Guzman came to Drive Change in 2015, he had a “higher grasp for life.”

“He came in energized, motivated, really mature for a younger guy,” Waterman said.

At Drive Change, Guzman began organizing fundraisers for the homeless, events with Black Lives Matter and anti-sex trafficking protests. He said he realized he had a gift for influencing people. He was introduced to the #CLOSErikers campaign when Jordan Lexton, the co-founder of Drive Change, forwarded him an email that read: ‘hey we’re trying to close rikers.’

“I never heard that in my life,” he said. “To hear that it’s going to close down was like justice for me.”

Guzman joined the campaign and the Just Leadership USA organization as a community organizer. He organizes 300 to 400 people to protests and different rallies. He also organizes formerly incarcerated people to get involved in state issues.

He adds that his organization has another campaign called the #FreeNew York Campaign. The Campaign was formed in 2017 in order to provide solutions to the jail crisis in New York City. For Vidal, you can’t close rikers without providing solutions to the statewide jail crisis.

“To successfully close Rikers, you need speedy trials, discovery law and bail reform,” Guzman said. “We have to really understand what’s the neck of all our problems in our community is mass incarceration.”

Guzman said that Just Leadership’s ultimate goal is to end mass incarceration across the nation by 2030. The way to do that, he said, is getting formerly incarcerated individuals to get involved in the community.

Waterman, who now works as the criminal justice project manager for Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said Guzman has “found his purpose, which is to speak out publicly about mass incarceration. He has the uncanny ability to engage and speak to people publicly.”

At City Hall, Guzman looked out at the small crowd gathered and declared that Rikers needs to close. Not 10 years from now as Mayor de Blasio originally planned, but now. Although de Blasio amended his plans this year, Guzman said it was due to the campaign and other organizations around the city pressuring the mayor.

“I’m here right now. I won’t believe three years ago that I’ll be here, working for this campaign, seeing when it’s first running and feeling like nothing was moving, and then one day to hear Mayor de Blasio say, ‘we want to close rikers,’” Guzman said.

He added, closing Rikers Island is not a job for him: “It’s a passion.”

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/journey-to-passion-formerly-incarcerated-youth-becomes-a-close-rikers-organizer/feed/0Formerly Incarcerated New Yorker Now Fights for Prison Reform for the Youthhttps://jjie.org/2018/04/25/formerly-incarcerated-new-yorker-now-fights-for-prison-reform-for-the-youth/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/formerly-incarcerated-new-yorker-now-fights-for-prison-reform-for-the-youth/#respondWed, 25 Apr 2018 17:22:32 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=701795NEW YORK — Herbert Murray, more than 6 feet tall and beanpole thin, held his clipboard and began to walk along the line of people outside City Hall Park in lower Manhattan who were waiting to join the one-year anniversary rally for the #CLOSErikers Campaign.

"Anyone need to sign in?" he asked the crowd as he made his way down the block.

A woman with glasses and her hair in a bun beckoned to him. She rested her sign against her legs — it was black with “$247,000 to detain a person at Rikers for a year” in large pink and white letters — and flipped through the pages to find her name.

After she returned the clipboard, he continued down the line, slowly thinning out as people filed through security and joined the growing crowd on the steps of City Hall. Cries of “Shut it down!” and “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Rikers Island’s got to go!” rang through the air. After signing in a final straggler, Murray said, “All right. We can start heading in.”

One year later — the two-year anniversary was Tuesday — much has changed. The campaign has seen huge strides in its goal to close the state’s largest jail.

10 years became 3 years

JustLeadershipUSA, an organization with the goal of halving the prison population by 2030, launched the campaign in April 2016 in partnership with the Katal Center for Health, Equity, and Justice. The campaign’s platform is that reform attempts in the state’s largest jail are not working and that it needs to be closed, with its resources funneled into the communities that need the most help.

Murray, 60, is a member of JustLeadershipUSA and an active supporter of #CLOSErikers, helping with event planning and outreach.

"I volunteer myself,” he said. “I don't get paid for this. I'm just doing it out of my passion of trying to get to half by 2030 and the immediate situation is trying to get Rikers closed."

Last year, in the weeks leading up to the one-year anniversary, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced a plan to close Rikers Island in 10 years, a timeline that activists said was too long. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office condemned Rikers Island in a February report about the state’s most problematic jails. They recommended that the city speed up its plan to close down the jail.

Now, de Blasio is working with a three-year timeline and plans to move the population housed in Rikers Island to new jails scattered throughout the boroughs.

"That will be my glory if I can see Rikers Island close,” said Murray about the new timeline. While he feels heartened, by the new timeline, he is skeptical until he sees real plans. He said he thinks the city’s politicians are playing politics and that the desire for change is not in their hearts.

Murray’s story

He believes wholeheartedly in JustLeadershipUSA’s mission because he was formerly incarcerated. In 1979 at the age of 21, Murray was arrested, tried and convicted — wrongfully, he said — for murder.He was sentenced to 15 years to life, was denied parole eight times and released in 2008 after serving 29 years. Now 60, he has spent as much time behind bars as free.

Being willing and able to tell his story is his real contribution to the campaign, Murray said.

“When I tell my story I can see the people. They're devastated. They don't believe it,” he said.

Murray shared his story with the Lippman Commission (formal name: the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform), a yearlong study into conditions on Rikers Island. It recommended in April 2017 that the city close down all detention facilities there. Among its reasons: it costs the equivalent of one year’s tuition to an Ivy League university to detain one person on the island for a year, and there is a culture of violence that goes deep into the institution’s core.

While the commission’s focus was Rikers Island, it examined conditions in the city’s smaller jails too, such as the Brooklyn Detention Center. He told the group about his experience there, something he found difficult to do, he said.

Brooklyn Detention Center

That day, he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the tall, inconspicuous building on Atlantic Avenue that is the Brooklyn Detention Center. As he stared at the rooftop, which serves as the recreation area for the jail and is the only place detainees can get fresh air and sunshine, memories of his detention there came flooding back.He and the other prisoners used to mill around the rooftop, he said. They were bored and wanted some entertainment, so they would look down at the pedestrians. Once the prisoners started yelling down to a woman, “Hey baby! How you doing?” She looked up, confused and caught off guard by the men screaming down at her.

“The outside of the facility, it blends right in [with the neighborhood]," he said. “But inside it's bunch of chaos."

Murray spent about 18 months there while he was on trial. He said his memories of the Brooklyn jail are bad but his memories of Rikers Island are far worse.

He was at Rikers Island for six months after his trial before being moved to a prison upstate to serve his sentence. His cell block was overcrowded, with not enough televisions, showers, phones or resources in general for the people housed there.

“That, right there, generated violence. It generated hostility,” he said.

Rikers culture

Murray witnessed a lot of violence at Rikers Island, but one incident in particular stood out. It was his last week before his transfer. He was lounging in the dayroom, killing time, when he saw a prisoner holding an iron mop wringer sneak up behind another man. The first man raised the wringer and starts to bludgeon the other man on the head. He fell to the ground, blood gushing. As the attacker raised his arm to strike again, Murray jumped up and tackled him. Several other prisoners in the room joined Murray and together they restrained the attacker until correction officers arrived.

In April 2017, Herbert Murray signs a woman in outside City Hall before the first anniversary of the #CLOSErikers Campaign.

Everyday tools, like that iron mop wringer, served as weapons on Rikers Island, Murray said.

"That was one of the standard things that we used!” he said. “The iron mop wringer. When we mopped the floor we just got the iron mop wringer so that was just so convenient.”

Violence is part of the culture of Rikers Island, he said. It was violent when he was there in 1981 and is still violent today.

But, sometimes the young men he meets who were more recently locked up there glorify the island and their time there, he said. They won’t tell you about what goes on there.

"They not going to tell [you] that they probably got jumped because nobody wants to be seen as being used and abused,” Murray said.

He thinks the city should invest in the smaller jails because they are more manageable, more hands on. It’s a less threatening environment overall, he said.

In April last year, Murray attended the news conference held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the release of the Lippman Commission’s report. As a participant, he was one of about 20 people seated on the stage looking out at the crowded auditorium. Murray was enthusiastic. Each time someone added a reason why Rikers should be closed, he yelled “Yea!” in encouragement.

"I was motivating them, you know?" he said.

There’s a photo of them standing on the John Jay stage in a New York Times article about the report’s release. Standing out at the end of the line of people wearing dark suits is a tall bald man in jeans. Murray didn’t realize he was going to be on stage that day and that he needed to wear a suit.

His life then and now

He lives alone and sets aside time so he can have what he calls “quiet time.” He really appreciates being able to have his down time, he said. He thinks it comes from the time he spent in solitary confinement during his sentence. That made him used to being alone and to a certain degree even appreciate it.

"I love my quiet time,” he said.

To say that prison changed Murray’s life is an understatement. Prior to his arrest in 1979, he’d had one minor brush with the law. When he was 16 he stole money from a classmate and received five years’ probation, which he completed. When he was arrested, he was living in an apartment in Flatbush with his girlfriend and newborn daughter. They were making a life for themselves. His girlfriend was in school and he was working in a restaurant in lower Manhattan.

"Life was beautiful! And then all this hell broke loose,” he said.

Free for 10 years now, he said he’s tried to let go of that part of his life.

"Many nights I couldn't sleep. Many nights I was angry at myself. Many nights I couldn't function because of my anger,” he said. “I had to learn to give it back.”

Now, Murray lives in New Jersey and commutes to his job at the Times Square Alliance in Manhattan. He first started working at there two months after being released from prison. He started off in their transitional work program as a sanitation worker but over the years he’s worked his way up the ranks.

Reentry

Murray said he loves Times Square and the Times Square Alliance. He credits his successful transition back into society to the place and its people. So much so that he even named the book he wrote about his time in prison “Standing Tall in Times Square.” The cover is a photo of him standing at the top of Times Square’s famous red steps wearing his Times Square Alliance uniform, a red jumpsuit.

"I came from hate. Every negative thing that you can possibly think of, that's what represents prison. Every positive thing that you can represent, that you can think about, that represents positivity, that's Times Square," he said.

He’s found community and mentorship during his time there he said. One such mentor was Senior Vice President of Security and Operations Tom Harris. Harris, a retired New York Police Department officer who served on the force for 25 years before starting at the Times Square Alliance, met Murray nearly 10 years ago. He said that what stands out the most about the first time they met was Murray’s big smile.

“He just oozed positivity,” Harris said. “You would think that someone who experienced what he experienced would be bitter. There’s no bitterness.”

Harris watched Murray work his way up the ranks over the years into a leadership position on his team. He said that some people have leadership titles who aren’t really leaders. That’s not the case with Murray.

“People look up to him,” Harris said. “People respect him.”

Sitting in a conference room in the Time Square Alliance offices, Murray said he can’t see himself working anywhere else. He loves everything about the bustling, tourist-filled square.

What encourages him

Murray said he believes in the transitional program that gave him his first job and tries to support the people currently going through it. One way he does this is by encouraging them to not stay silent and to talk to people about their situations, a tactic that has worked really well for him over the past 10 years.

"A lot of them don't want to talk about their situation because of embarrassment or whatever but I tell them why be embarrassed?" he said.

Not everyone makes it through the program, he said, but he’s happy for those who do. Meeting them and hearing their stories helps encourage him to keep up the fight for criminal justice reform.

"We have to save these kids,” Murray said. “We have to save them. Because they are going to mess up. Society makes sure they do that."

Now, when he recalls his experience of being locked up and going through the criminal justice system he can’t help but think about how immature he was mentally. Though he was 21 when arrested, he feels that mentally he was more like a 16-year-old. He doesn’t want the young men he meets now to go through that.

He’s especially concerned about the way the system is set up so youth fail.

"They got 29 years out of me already,” Murray said. “I'm not the target. These kids are the target.”

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]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/formerly-incarcerated-new-yorker-now-fights-for-prison-reform-for-the-youth/feed/0LGBTQ Youth More Likely to Become Homeless, Latest Chapin Hall Report Findshttps://jjie.org/2018/04/25/lgbtq-youth-more-likely-to-become-homeless-latest-chapin-hall-report-finds/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/lgbtq-youth-more-likely-to-become-homeless-latest-chapin-hall-report-finds/#respondWed, 25 Apr 2018 13:27:46 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=701664WASHINGTON —Lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and queer youths have nearly double the risk of winding up homeless as their straight peers — and they’re twice as likely to die on the streets once they get there, a new study finds.

Homelessness amongst LGBTQ youth is highest amongst the black and brown, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall concluded in their new report, “Voices of LGBTQ Youth,” which was released today. Nearly one in four black or brown LGBTQ people between the ages of 18 and 25 had been homeless in the previous 12 months, researchers found.

“It really reinforces the importance of understanding the intersecting subpopulations that are at risk,” said Matthew Morton, principal researcher on the report and a fellow at Chapin Hall.

Chapin Hall has been studying youth homelessness for the better part of two years. Rather than roll its findings out in a behemoth volume, the center has been narrowing its focus to specific areas and releasing them in more digestible servings, which the center calls “research-to-impact” briefs. This LGBTQ analysis is the second of several. A report on pregnant and parenting youths is expected next month, a report on homeless youth in small towns is expected in June, and up to four others will follow in the months to come, Morton said.

Today’s findings were built not just around complex statistical analysis, Morton added. Researchers also spent hours interviewing LGBTQ youths in 22 cities about their experiences to add a qualitative dimension to the research. Among the (perhaps) surprising findings: Few reported that they became homeless because they had been cut off by ultraconservative families, Morton said.

“Very few young people had this event where they came out and then were evicted. A lot of people in the public assume that’s kind of how it happens,” Morton said.

Rather, researchers found that a young person’s coming out was just one correlative among many, including poverty, drug abuse or mental health problems in the family. “For a lot of LGBTQ, it’s a slow boil,” Morton said.

Individual experiences in report

The report’s reliance on the voices of youths themselves made it “huge,” said Nick Seip, a spokesman for the True Colors Fund, a New York-based nonprofit group that helps combat LGBTQ homelessness and that helped put together the report. “Sometimes, we forget to ask them about their expertise,” he said.

One of the voices belongs to Dee Balliet, of Columbus, Ohio. Now 28, Balliet is a gay man with African and Latin roots who has twice found himself homeless. The first time was when he was 16 and came out to his mother. He was on the streets by the end of the day. He remained homeless until his sister was able to lease an apartment under her name, just shy of Balliet’s 18th birthday.

After college, he took a job in Indianapolis but the company housing he had been led to believe was waiting for him fell apart and he found himself in a homeless shelter. The men there were older and aggressively straight. Even staff made jokes and used anti-gay slurs.

“I didn’t even feel safe sitting in the lobby. I felt more comfortable sleeping in my car,” Balliet recalled.

Balliet said he’s grateful for this report because it offers “legitimacy” to his experiences and the experiences of countless other youths like him. But he’s not waiting for the report to make an impact: He founded and helps run the National Youth Forum on Homelessness, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping youths pull themselves off the streets.

Things are better for him now, Balliet said: His mother is slowly thawing (she has marched in the last two AIDS awareness parades in Columbus; “It’s the small wins,” he said). What’s important is to make sure that this report doesn’t fall into the void. Too much depends upon it, he said.

“Yeah, there’s a lot that I’ve been through,” Balliet said. “How do we get it right for the next person?”

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/lgbtq-youth-more-likely-to-become-homeless-latest-chapin-hall-report-finds/feed/0Los Angeles Housing Patterns That Reinforced Segregation Reverberate to This Dayhttps://jjie.org/2018/04/25/los-angeles-housing-patterns-that-reinforced-segregation-reverberate-to-this-day/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/los-angeles-housing-patterns-that-reinforced-segregation-reverberate-to-this-day/#respondWed, 25 Apr 2018 12:00:54 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=700530LOS ANGELES — Land remains the starkest turf of bigotry in American life. Blacks have been kept out, locked in, preyed upon and segregated by their most basic need when slavery ended: housing. There were entire coastlines that blacks weren’t allowed to set foot on, let alone buy property on.

Bridging the Divide

Christopher West

In the early 1900s, Southern California had vibrant black communities on this coastline, where Venice and Santa Monica had “considerable African-American businesses and residency,” said Christopher D. West, an assistant professor of history at Pasadena City College.

But local whites — police, homeowners and business owners — fought Inkwell Beach, the integrated beach near Santa Monica’s first black church, from the early 1920s through the 1950s. It took years of fights — first, a literal physical fight that left one black man shot and beaten by police, followed by legal fights of civil rights activists against bigoted neighborhood associations — for the area to become a safe place for blacks to dip their toes into the Pacific.

Racism that was once out in the open took different shapes as time passed, hiding itself in federal, state and local law, insidiously subtle rules tucked in housing covenants or unspoken codes between homeowners to keep blacks out of homeownership.

UCLA

Michael Lens

“This results in cycles of discrimination, segregation and disinvestment where over the course of decades people of color are forced to live in undesirable areas and they’re not provided much opportunity over the years; and we tell them you have a lot of crime and poverty, what’s wrong with you guys,” said Michael Lens, an associate professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA. That negative framing discourages, which contributes to disenfranchisement.

Contrary to President Donald Trump’s claims this past December that black homeownership rates are at an all-time high, they peaked in 2004 — and have dropped further and faster than any racial or ethnic group since 2001, according to the Urban Institute.

That puts black homeownership rates at levels similar to those before the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (every other group saw rates rise). The hardest-hit families were married black households, according to the Urban Institute.

Poor access to credit, equity

“The new Jim Crow was more about access to credit — even for middle-class African Americans who go to college, they struggle to maintain good credit to this day,” West said.

So homeownership became “the beginning of where whiteness became a benefit of what is known as intergenerational wealth transfer,” he said. In short, those who pay mortgages develop equity and something to leave behind for next generations — those who pay rent leave little behind. “Americans hold their wealth primarily in real estate, which in itself creates a level of tension for access to it,” he said.

Nowadays, many black families are moving to the inland desert stretches — many miles east of the coast in less desirable places, like Palmdale, Lancaster or Riverside, West said. With cheaper rents and more realistic home prices, black communities are forced to the fringes of cities in their efforts to amass and create wealth through homeownership.

Plus, Lens of UCLA said, there is little for the non-luxury home buyer to choose from. He considers the housing crisis in Los Angeles to be the country’s worst, with severe housing scarcity.

“Land costs are so expensive because it’s so hard to build in L.A. that the only things that can go there and make money is something that is really tall and focuses on luxury condos and high-price clientele,” said Lens.

Which is partly why concentrations of black people are seen in areas where there are housing projects.

First built to serve impoverished whites, public housing gave priority to whites and some housing projects were whites-only until no more white applicants existed. Only then were blacks were allowed to enter.

The high-rise and megaplex styles of public housing were slowly integrated in the wake of the civil rights movement, and at the urging of the NAACP to provide more homes to people of color. In response to integration, low-income whites were offered vouchers to use to pay rent for private apartments instead of being assigned housing in the projects.

Freeway broke up Sugar Hill

Even in stereotypically liberal places like Los Angeles, local governments undertook policies that harmed black communities. The city’s first freeway was built through the heart of a vibrant black community in 1945.

What was known as LA’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, named after the Harlem neighborhood, was broken up, displacing local blacks. Interstate 10’s placement came after a long campaign against black residents of Sugar Hill. The local housing association went to court to evict them from the neighborhood, but a state judge ruled such a covenant would be in violation of the 14th Amendment. In response to more affluent African Americans buying homes in Sugar Hill, the city rezoned the area for rentals over their protest.

Economic Policy Institute

Richard Rothstein

“African American leaders pleaded that the freeway be shifted slightly north, but the city engineer dismissed their concerns,” wrote University of California at Berkeley professor Richard Rothstein in his book “The Color of Law.” Few of those displaced were given any federal or local assistance to find new housing, he wrote.

Where local laws didn’t succeed in preventing black homeownership, local bigots took up the cause with violence, such as “cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism as well as numerous phone threats,” Rothstein noted.

Even liberal-seeming policies were exacted with racist outcomes. Consider the New Deal. The sweeping set of post-Great Depression federal programs developed to provide jobs, homes and aid development of the American middle class is largely credited for restoring order to the economy.

“The New Deal was progressive in the sense that it provided economic benefits to both whites and blacks that were necessary and on which they depended — but it was on a segregated basis,” Rothstein said. “... People are shocked when they learn this history.”

It was during Roosevelt’s presidency and because of his seemingly liberal policies that African Americans first flocked to support Democrats, altering the face of American politics, Rothstein said. With segregation ingrained into those policies, racial gaps persisted long beyond FDR’s era, seeping into schools, housing and employment access. Black Americans face outsized incarceration and are wrongly criminalized. The face of today’s civil rights movement asserts that Black Lives Matter — demanding the basic right to exist. Modern racial gaps and inequality can be traced back to the New Deal in many ways, Rothstein said.

“I think in the long run it did more harm than good,” he said.

Study links segregation to police violence

Boston University

Aldina Mesic

Where there is more segregation, there are more black deaths at the hands of police, Aldina Mesic, a Boston University researcher, and colleagues have found. She has co-written a groundbreaking new study linking police violence against blacks to segregation and other institutionalized racism.

“It’s hard to ignore that we have hundreds of years of a racist history, and then that was followed by 90 years of Jim Crow — that doesn’t go away very quickly,” she said.

One of the most visible modern outcomes of yesteryear’s policies is the Black Lives Matter movement, the persistent call to stop state violence against black communities. The relationship between segregation and crime is poorly understood, but increasingly scholars and researchers are saying it is a direct link. Rothstein said that, even anecdotally, the relationship is made clear by considering its dynamic.

“If you segregate the most economically disadvantaged and racially stigmatized young men in a single neighborhood, where there is little access to jobs or transportation to jobs, and few adult role models, they are inevitably going to get involved with confrontations with police and police are going to overreact,” he said.

“It’s a direct function of the concentration of hopeless young men and alienated young men in neighborhoods that have little opportunity.”

Some findings in Mesic’s study were surprising, even to the researchers.

“We thought that the states with the highest racism index were going to be Southern states, with a history like slavery,” Mesic said. In fact, Illinois, Wisconsin and a number of states outside the South rated high for racism and black deaths by police gunfire.

The study took into account a number of measures of racial inequality, from housing and employment, to educational attainment and pay gap. She hopes people will look at the study’s outcomes as broadly.

“Whenever there is a police shooting, the initial line of reaction is to demand more training or body cameras, and we come to think that the problem is a bunch of racist police officers that are not like us,” Mesic said. In reality, to persist, racism must infiltrate many different institutions that may play into a policing problem — which means police aren’t the only racists, they are an armed component of a racist society, she said.

“It’s not just the police officers. It’s all of us,” Mesic said.

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]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/25/los-angeles-housing-patterns-that-reinforced-segregation-reverberate-to-this-day/feed/0Los Angeles’ Vast Child Welfare System Has a Lot to Teach Rest of Nationhttps://jjie.org/2018/04/23/los-angeles-vast-child-welfare-system-has-a-lot-to-teach-rest-of-nation/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/23/los-angeles-vast-child-welfare-system-has-a-lot-to-teach-rest-of-nation/#respondMon, 23 Apr 2018 12:00:47 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=698488LOS ANGELES — You can only find the entrance to the RightWay Foundation if you’re really looking for it. Hidden deep within the parking structure for a South Central Los Angeles shopping plaza, the foundation aims to help foster youth learn basic life skills (how to open a bank account, for example), get counseling for the trauma they’ve likely endured and navigate the transition to young adulthood.

“It just comes down to no one knows how to work with our babies, especially in South Central,” he said. “They do not know how to handle tough kids, or kids who appear to have attitude problems. Some of our social workers take it personal. You get cursed out by a kid, they’re not cursing youout. They’re cursing out what they went through. If you can’t display that you have compassion and you’re there for the kid, forget about it. Our kids will smell fakeness, they can smell fake cologne a mile away.”

RightWay Foundation

Franco Vega

In Los Angeles, those interactions between social workers and kids are frequent: LA had the third-highest “rate of removal” of children from their families last year among the 10 largest U.S. cities. But removing lots of children from their homes doesn’t necessarily translate to those children being safer, some advocates caution.

In the short term, vast numbers of children under county care can overwhelm the system, allowing kids who really are in acute danger to slip through the cracks. And in the long term, there is considerable evidencesuggesting that for the most part, kids who stay with parents (or extended family) can expect better outcomes in life.

“We’re definitely understanding the need for trauma-informed practice,” said Diane Iglesias, senior deputy director at DCFS, “and we have also recognized the trauma in our workers, which at times can interfere with their ability to be effective.”

What follows is a look at three major factors — disastrous situations that make the headlines, poverty and the challenges of getting out of the system once you’re in — that contribute to the size of LA’s child welfare system.

Fallout from tragedy

“LA has had some very high-profile tragedies” involving children killed by family members or family members’ significant others, said Sara Bartosz, deputy director of litigation strategy at the New York-based nonprofit Children’s Rights. “Rightly, these tragedies make it into the papers, and people care, and that can lead to higher levels of intakes and then the system’s capacity gets challenged. The safety net gets stretched and, too frequently, shredded.”

The 2013 death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez is still working its way through the justice system, with four former DCFS employees involved with Fernandez awaiting trial on charges of felony child abuse and falsifying public records. This is the first time in Los Angeles County that social workers have faced criminal charges in relation to the death of a child.

One 10-year veteran of the DCFS, a social worker who spoke to Youth Today on condition of anonymity, said the suit “terrified people” in the department and that some supervisors are working from a place of fear. “If they have had a child fatality on their caseload … then they may be more likely to supervise in response to that experience and be very conservative moving forward,” the social worker said.

Kenneth Krekorian, executive director of Los Angeles Dependency Lawyers, confirmed that this is the case. Over the past five years or so, he and his colleagues’ caseloads have skyrocketed. Best practice would be for each attorney representing a parent in dependency court to handle around 100 cases each, Krekorian said, but his organization’s attorneys are working around 285 each.

“Social workers are too busy to do the necessary research, so they file a petition to be better safe than sorry,” Krekorian said. “It’s human nature, and it’s better to err on the side of the child — and I say that as a parents’ attorney.”

The downside to that natural instinct is when a jurisdiction finds itself in a “foster care panic,” the term that National Coalition for Child Protection Reform Executive Director Richard Wexler uses for the dramatic increase in child removals that often follows a tragedy like the Fernandez case. It may lead to an overall decrease in child safety when the child welfare system is too overwhelmed with cases to notice kids in acute danger.

Iglesias pointed out that in the wake of tragedy, there’s an uptick in calls to DCFS, which leads to an uptick in detentions: “The police respond, [DCFS] responds and mandated reporters respond.” The way to interrupt that cycle, she said, is to be aware of it and its pitfalls. “Being trauma-informed is understanding that removing the child from a home is a trauma,” she said. That way, “I think we can stop the knee-jerk response.”

The poverty factor

In 2016, 21.5 percent of LA city residents lived in poverty, well above the federal rate of 12.7 percent. The ways in which poverty sometimes can be conducive to actual neglect — homelessness, contact with the criminal justice system, caregivers’ untreated depression or food insecurity, to name a few — may at times be mistaken for neglect or abuse by social workers.

“Poverty is one important factor [in the number of families involved with DCFS] that a lot of people are ignoring,” Vega said, emphasizing that children and families living in poverty are the ones who tend to appear on DCFS’ radar.

CASA of Los Angeles

Wende Nichols-Julien

“If you’re born in poverty and you come to school looking dirty, like you haven’t been cleaned, then that opens up the door for an investigation” if a concerned teacher or social worker calls a hotline, he said. “Before they get into the foster care system, a lot of families are homeless — it’s not illegal or a violation to be homeless with your kids, it just brings up a red flag” when families try to take advantage of services for homeless people.

For its part, DCFS firmly refutes the idea that poverty has a role in child removals. “Our workers have enough cases that they don’t need to try to do social engineering and pull kids out of poverty situations,” Iglesias said.

But poverty’s role in the system might be subtler than conscious attempts at social engineering.

Conventional wisdom about DCFS is that it struggles with a shortage of available foster care families. Some advocates think that formulation is backwards, however: “That isn’t the problem,” said Wende Nichols-Julien, CEO of CASA of Los Angeles. The problem, she said, is that too many kids in Los Angeles County are removed from their homes.

Offering a theory as to why there are so many removals, she pointed to the “overuse of a system that is really addressing symptoms around poverty, substance abuse, mass incarceration, homelessness and other issues that lead families into the system.” We aren’t offering enough services to struggling families before the situation becomes dire and a child is removed from the home, she said. “And then people get into the system, and they get stuck.”

Stuck in the system

Denise Johnston is the director of Families and Criminal Justice, an LA-based nonprofit that works with incarcerated mothers to preserve relationships with their children. “The removal issue,” she said, “is the result of a combination of scrutiny and discrimination.”

For example, “pregnant women who give birth while incarcerated have a newborn removal rate of 30 to 50 percent, but if they get released and give birth in the community, the rate is less than 10 percent. And those removals are typically based upon a currently open child welfare case or a positive drug test,” she said. The difference, she pointed out, is that women giving birth in custody are subject to more surveillance than a woman giving birth in the community.

This surveillance that can accompany poverty — such as when a parent applies for various county services for low-income or homeless families — can put a family on DCFS’ radar, for better or for worse.

The upside, of course, is that a child might be removed from danger. The downside, Kerkorian pointed out, is that once a family has an open DCFS case, getting out is not easy. His clients struggle to meet the court-mandated requirements they must satisfy to reunite with their children, and that can spark a vicious cycle: “When kids are taken away, that takes away a source of funding for parents. So they might become homeless and can’t get their kids back for that reason, and they can’t get a job if they’re traveling to court-mandated drug counseling all day. But they need counseling to regain custody.”

“The housing crisis and homelessness are very serious problems that impacts people's ability to care for their children because they’re working two or three jobs, or they don’t have sufficient living situations, so they end up in situations that are called neglect or that are neglect because of the poverty that they’re living in due to the housing crisis,” Nichols-Julien said.

Make sure parents are provided the baseline of “reasonable services” they are entitled to:

“LA doesn’t provide adequate services to parents [before DCFS taps them], so problems that might have been resolved through services get larger and there’s a filing as a result of that,” Kerkorian said. “We have a lot of mental illness with our clients and there’s not enough funding to give them counseling. Most of our clients have anger management, substance abuse or mental health issues, or all three, and to get adequate counseling is expensive. The county is supposed to provide reduced fees for counseling but it doesn’t always happen, or it may take a parent three hours each way to get to counseling, or a program is full” and a parent can’t get a spot, and therefore can’t meet the requirements for reunification with his or her child.

Bring an awareness of trauma into the relationships between foster youth and DCFS:

“You can’t learn this from a book,” Vega said. “It’s compassion, teaching them how to be warm and empathetic.”

This story has been updated.

]]>https://jjie.org/2018/04/23/los-angeles-vast-child-welfare-system-has-a-lot-to-teach-rest-of-nation/feed/0Police in Illinois Are Helping Substance Abusers Get Into Rehab Instead of Arresting Themhttps://jjie.org/2018/04/18/police-in-illinois-are-helping-substance-abusers-get-into-rehab-instead-of-arresting-them/
https://jjie.org/2018/04/18/police-in-illinois-are-helping-substance-abusers-get-into-rehab-instead-of-arresting-them/#respondWed, 18 Apr 2018 15:02:04 +0000http://jjie.org/?p=696738DIXON, Illinois — Ronald Reagan didn’t start the war on drugs but he did his best to finish it. Law enforcement budgets soared, the jails were packed and the war was carried as far afield as Latin America and Afghanistan.

So it might count as one of history’s minor ironies that here in Dixon, just a few blocks from Reagan’s boyhood home, the local police have called a ceasefire in the war on drugs.

“We’re changing the way law enforcement views addiction — to see it as a disease, not a crime,” said Dixon Police Detective Jeff Ragan.

Three years ago, after three young people died of overdoses over 10 days, Dixon became one of the first police departments in the country to stop jailing addicts and start getting them help. Under a program Dixon calls “Safe Passage,” the police department here and in nearby towns are allowing addicts to bring in their drugs, no question asked, and they’ll help them check into a rehab center. At least 267 people have gone through the program, Ragan said.

It’s still early in the process, but among the side benefits of Safe Passage are that Dixon police contacts with juveniles have plummeted — from 127 in 2015, when Safe Passage launched, to 95 last year, Ragan said. The program has since spread to 100 other police departments in Illinois and 300 in the country. Dixon was the second police department to try it, after police in Gloucester, Massachusetts launched PAARI — the police-assisted addiction and recovery initiative.

It’s an approach that’s long overdue, said Natalie Andrews, a licensed clinical social worker who sits on the Safe Passage task force with Ragan. “This is a public health crisis,” she said. “It’s a public health epidemic.”

Effects of drug crisis

LinkedIn

Dixon Police Detective Jeff Ragan

Between 2010 and 2015, overdose deaths rose by more than 108 percent in Dixon’s Lee County. In neighboring Whiteside County, just 10 minutes up Route 2 from Dixon, overdoses rose by 361 percent over the same period, state public health data show. Like most places in the country, the damage has fallen heavily on youths: Drug overdose deaths among Americans 15 to 24 rose by 28 percent from 2015 to 2016, according to federal data.

That’s just one aspect of the disaster. The opioid crisis has strained the entire fabric of rural areas like Dixon, Andrews said. (The foster care system, for instance, has been flooded with youths whose parents have been crippled by addiction.) Helping people kick their addiction is really only the first step, Andrews say.

Many of the people recovering from addiction started their habits as teens and represent a kind of lost generation. Andrews finds herself working with recovering addicts on basic adulthood skills — resume writing, the basics of healthy, intimate relationships with partners, time management.

Results

As for why juvenile contacts in Dixon have dropped so quickly, Ragan said he’s not sure. He’s open to the possibility that it’s unrelated to Safe Passage. But the program has already been a success by any measure, he adds. Residential burglaries and retail thefts have dropped, as have drug arrests.

“It’s helping a lot of people. We’re trying to get people back into the community,” Ragan said. “It takes less time to put somebody in Safe Passage and to get them, hopefully, back on the right track compared to arresting them over and over again, doing the paperwork, going to court. If we can not arrest someone and help them, that's what we're going to do.”

There has been some on-the-job learning, though. Many of the people who’ve gone through Safe Passage have had to come back — some multiple times, Ragan said, adding that it’s difficult to keep track of people once they check into rehab. The program has just won a state grant to hire five, part-time rehab coaches, in the hopes that they’ll help close the gap on the back end, he said.

Among Safe Passage’s other unintended consequences, Ragan said, is a new way for cops to take pride in their work.

“When officers see someone stick with it and become a part of the community again, it just makes me feel good,” he said.